[vouaobrasil]

Back when I read in detail about the original antitrust investigations into Microsoft regarding the browser and the OS, I truly thought these antitrust investigations were a good thing.

Well, I still believe in antitrust laws, but I feel they have become much more of a symbolic gesture in a contellation of gestures that pay lip service to the function of law as something good for society. I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good? How many businesses will now switch to a different product given the tight technical integration that Microsoft offers to large and medium-sized businesses?

Tech companies have learned how to handle antitrust: now, they make their products highly interoperable and integrated. They also bundle their products and they KNOW that even if antitrust laws come to past, the initial entrenchment will already have done "the damage" of getting the product "out there", and the worst that happens to them is a small fine and some minor legal troubles, easily handled by the best legal teams.

This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that the Microsoft of the future would not even have the resources to create Microsoft Teams in the first place (if they were already focused on Microsoft Office).

[silverquiet]

> they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.

This does not reflect my experience - I can't make a video call from teams to someone on Zoom; I can't chat with someone on Slack. My iMessage client loses all kinds of functionality when I send a text to someone using Android. I could go on.

I worked at a place that dropped Slack for Teams. Everyone believed that Slack was the better product, but the company already bought Office which bundled Teams while Slack cost money. It's the most obvious anti-competitive practice I've experienced.

[icegreentea2]

The think OP means interoperable and integrated within their garden/product offerings.

[snoopsnopp]

What do you mean by that? I don’t understand.

[quickslowdown]

Teams and Office and SharePoint and Loop are all Microsoft products. They're all integrated tightly with Teams.

That's what they mean by interoperability within the walled garden of Microsoft products.

[kohbo]

Sorry but creating a meeting in teams is almost completely disjointed from the equivalent process on Outlook. Half of the features are missing on the Teams side. I can't even see other people's calendar or add people from my contact list outside of the org. It's terribly integrated.

[frumper]

I think that's your organizations settings. I have virtually the same process to make a meeting in Teams as I do in Outlook. Both are easy. I can definitely add anyone from my contact list, including those outside of my org.

[quickslowdown]

I wasn't commenting on the quality of these integrations. They're shit and I know it. Just pointing out that integration does mean something here

[chipdart]

> I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good?

I think it clearly does the world a whole lot of good. It would be disastrous if a single company leveraged it's monopoly over a platform to force-feed the world their own instant communication service just because they can deploy an email client bundled with a spreadsheet, word processor, and misc office productivity software.

Put yourself in the position of a company such as Slack. It is beyond any doubt a far superior service than Microsoft Teams. Yet, forcing Teams to be bundled with Word, Excel, and specially Outlook ends up forcing Teams upon people in spite of being a clearly inferior alternative. If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook.

So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?

[jodrellblank]

> "If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook."

And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad, but stayed in places using Discord because it's much better. Teams is nice. Part of why Slack is bad is because they're trying to turn "send small amounts of text over the internet" into a billion dollar VC funded business and the foundations can't hack it. Part of why Teams is nice is because it integrates well with Office and Microsoft 365, that makes it a clearly superior alternative.

> "So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?"

How exactly is making a better product (Teams) which integrates well with other products (desirable features) 'forcing' or 'abusing' anything just because you're a hater with an axe to grind?

[chipdart]

> And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad (...)

I don't know what counts as good in your book, but to me Slack is by far the best professional-oriented messaging tool around.

Certainly Microsoft Teams is not it. It's messaging UI feels as if the goal was to copy 1990s ICQ, with matching search capabilities.

[ghusto]

Slack is at once a poor communication product, and a beacon of excellence in comparison to MS Teams. It says much that I'd rather use Slack than MS Teams. The bar was low, but by god did they limbo under it somehow.

Basic UX like it being clear when I'm replying to a message or starting a thread are fantastically broken. It's clunky, buggy, slow. It's just a shit-show in every respect. Normally I respect people's preferences, but your preference is wrong.

[vouaobrasil]

I agree, which is why I said I believe in antitrust. But my point was that the good it does is an incremental movement to a local maximum, which is in a series of descending local maxima that is leading to a worse world.

So while you are correct that it does do good (and I acknowledged that), the good it does is merely the movement to the next in a long line of shrinking islands in a poisonous sea.

[jauntywundrkind]

> they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.

The 90s componentware comes to mind as a possible direction here. Allow interop & integration, but require it to be over public APIs that anyone can use.

I was a kid messing around with basic and c++ and then web for a lot of this time, but it seems the object-oriented world of the 90s was trying hard to create all manners of components that could integrate, embed, & use each other. Corba, DCOM, OLE, ActiveObjects, whatever NeXTStep was doing... this was going to be the future, before the internet showed up & rescoped the scale of interconnectivity to be beyond the machine level.

> This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that

Not really sure if I'm opposed or not. But I do think we absolutely should have Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interoperability. We should be able to riff off & extend each other's software, without everyone making software getting to write whatever incredible legal moat their army of lawyers can masterfully craft around the products/business.

We are stuck in the old Ma Bell age, where Facebook says you can only use Facebook provided software to connect; it's so rampantly apparent that this hijacking of software & property law by contract law & terms of use - that gives companies whatever control they please - is a terrible curse & constraint on humanity. We need a Carterphone decision for the 21st century (for all software, not just the big softwares).

[foolswisdom]

Antitrust has almost never been applied to big tech, in part because antitrust enforcement in general is only given lip service for many decades. This environment means it's also very difficult for antitrust enforcers to win even if they wanted to. This has been changing recently though. https://www.thebignewsletter.com is a great resource on these things.

[sunaookami]

It just sounds like you have given up because these companies can do anything and the fines do not affect them. The answer is splitting them up and preventing them from abusing their market power in the first place. And in fact Microsoft should have been split up since 2001 but Bush intervened. The US would never do anything that damages the monopoly power of a domestic company.

[vouaobrasil]

Given up? Not really...my goal is to promote the dissolution of large corporations and big tech in particular and I think that is entirely possible.

[geraldhh]

nothing wrong here, thou imo (anti-)trust is an integral part of societal organization as almost every interaction requires some trust and can't handle too much.

[aunwick]

I'm confounded. Backup 30 years and replace Microsoft with at&t and it sounds like the chorus line. Somewhere between agile is bullshit and Microsoft is bullshit is something that makes life and work better for all. Where is it?

[vouaobrasil]

Who knows, but it would be much easier to find if big tech did not exist. In that case, medium-sized organizations would have many more opportunities to try things and make a modest profit. As long as big tech exists, your ideal point will never be found.